The mailbox appears as such because we are able to recognize the eidetic, because we situate it within a shared horizon of institutions governed by collective ends and personally appropriated by placing our individual ends within those institutional frames. But the eidetic appears because the immediately present things like mailboxes are finally horizoned by our anticipation of the Whole and the whole of our own life as sealed by our own demise. How we view the Whole (our philosophy or theology) and how we anticipate the final shape of our own individual lives governs how we approach even the simplest things in life—things like the humble mailbox.
With all this attention to the eidetic, to the system of essences as the glasses through which we look at things in the environment, have we not lost existence, have we not lost this actual mailbox? There are certain privileged moments when the individuality of its existence might come to the fore. Consider the mailbox alongside the road just after sunrise. The clouds are tinged with an orange-gold glow reflected on the surface of the mailbox. The morning dew is still on its surface. A spider has woven its web between the edge of the box and the post on which it sits. The dew on the web and on the box glistens in the sunlight. A sense of freshness and promise pervades the cool air. We are gripped by the display, held by its beauty. In the functional world within which we operate, the pre-understanding in virtue of which we take up things in certain ways involves our focus upon the goals under which we subsume what presents itself. Being halted by the beauty of a particular display pulls us up short, sets us in the Now in a transformed way—even opening out to a possible theophany. As Martin Buber said, “Sunlight on a maple twig and a glimpse through to the Eternal Thou is worth more than all the [mystical] experiences on the edge of life.”
But no matter what our focus, the lure of the Whole constitutes the implicit background within which we come to understand anything and to grasp and pursue our goals. It is that lure which generates the questions that set in motion the history of philosophy. What is the nature of the Whole? How can we come into proper relation to that Whole? How does that relate to our everyday focal concerns? How is our awareness related to the dark biological ground that underpins it? How is it related to the community that antecedes it as the source of the institutions whereby I define and realize my own individual possibilities? What does it portend with respect to my own inevitable demise? The descriptively available evidences we have explored both lead to such questions and relate the putative answers back to the togetherness of such evidences in order to test the adequacy of our larger claims.
9.
These observations lead us to a view of human nature as culture-creating nature and thus as essentially historical. Human nature is the constant; culture and history are the variables. Based upon what we have seen, human nature presents itself as bipolar, as organically based reference to the Whole.
We are obviously organisms, some of whose organs are the basis for sensory experience. The organs serve the powers of perception but also the desires for food, drink, and sex served in turn by perception of what is beneficial or harmful to our flourishing as organic beings. The objects of perception and biological desire are ever present in wakeful life as individual and actual. They are the most obvious inhabitants of “reality.” This establishes one pole to our experience.
The less obvious feature of experience is an empty reference to the whole of what-is that founds the questions, What’s it all about? What is our place in the whole scheme of things? And, What is the whole scheme of things? That reference is a function of the notion of Being which makes the mind to be a mind. Everything is included in its scope, for outside being is nothing. But by itself it yields no knowledge of anything in particular. We begin to fill in that empty reference by experience and inference governed by the principle of noncontradiction that holds for the whole of experience and what we might infer from it.
It is that reference to the Whole via the notion of Being that is the basis for both what we call intellect and what we call will. Being directed to the Whole of what is, we are also directed to the whole of space and time which allows us to abstract eidetic features that refer to anytime and anyplace such features might be met in the individuals given in sensory experience. Abstraction leads to judgment which puts the abstractions together with the experienced objects. And judgment allows for inference when we put judgments together in reasoning processes following the principle of noncontradiction.
That same reference to the Whole is what makes will possible as the freedom to choose. Referred by our nature to the Whole, we are free in the face of anything less than the Whole and are thus able to determine ourselves. But that can only happen insofar as we understand the possibilities for our choice given by intellectual operations. Thus intellect and will are like two sides of the same coin: each presupposes the other. We cannot understand unless we choose, and we cannot choose unless we understand the options.
The building up of our view of the Whole is linked to the limitation of our experience and the inadequacy of the frameworks for understanding that experience. That is why science has a history of uncovering nature. And our choices are limited by our understanding of possibilities. At first they were extremely limited. Over time each of us attains to habitual ways of understanding and choosing. Passed on to others, these ways sediment into institutions, that is, loci of practices that focus and hone our possibilities for acting. Because of the differing ways of understanding and the differing character of institutions, cultures are necessarily plural. And because understanding and choice develop over time, cultures have a history—much of it brought about by interaction between cultures.
Each of us is born and raised in a determinate culture as mediated by the more or less limited understanding possessed by those who raised us. That process focuses the possibilities given by each of our individual genetic makeups. So when reflective awareness begins to emerge in each of us, we are already determined by two structures we did not choose: our genetic makeup and our cultural shaping. These give us the initial motivational structure for choosing. When we begin to make our own choices, we further determine our own habit-structure within the frameworks of the genetic and cultural stamps given to us. At any given moment then we have three already determined levels that constitute any given Me: a genetic level, a cultural level, and a personal-historical level. We cannot erase the fact that Here-and-Now we are each determined by these three levels, in the peculiar forms they have taken in each of us. But any given person has the bipolar structure sketched above. Reference to the Whole grounds the I as the ability to understand and choose from among the possibilities afforded by the I’s own Me. The Me is the artist’s material for the I, the already determinate stuff for the I’s choosing. What am I going to do with Me? is the question each one of us always faces. And what we do depends upon how we understand the possibilities afforded by that tri-level structure.
The interplay of these levels sediments into a dynamic center that a long tradition has called “the heart.” It is the ground of our spontaneous tendency to move in certain directions, to be attracted by certain possibilities and repelled by others. It is our more or less automatic pilot, the default position for everyday action. But being directed toward the Whole, I am always placed in conscious life at a reflective distance from Me, on account of which I have to ask myself: Where is my heart? Is it where it ought to be? Where ought it to be?
Reflective distance makes the individual responsible for its own actions. It becomes the cutting edge of the culture which it can sustain, develop, or subvert. Its full development lies in the cultivation of its spontaneous proclivities for action when thought reaches the heart. Religiously, that means when God moves from object of thought to a living Presence.
Now the function of philosophy is to make the invariable structures explicit, those that are present phenomenologically and those that underlie foundationally. That is why John Paul points to a move from phenomenon to foundation. We will follow that move in the treatment of the various